The following excerpt from a brief review of the I960 film adaptation of Inherit the Wind emphasizes the real-life events upon which the drama is based.

Although Stanley Kramer, who produced as well as directed this film version of a Broadway play about the 1925 trial of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Darwin's theory of human evolution, doesn't use the names of the real-life characters, his publicity for the picture stresses the fact that the film is about the so-called "Monkey Trial."

Therefore, and for the benefit of all who are too young to remember that bizarre occurrence, I would like to point out that Kramer's film departs from truth on two fundamentally important points. First, Scopes was not arrested in the course of persecution by bigots but as the result of volunteering to make a test case of a newly enacted Tennessee statute forbidding the...